Wait a minute…Steven Soderbergh got a crime movie out on HBO Max this year, and I only just found out about it, like, two weeks ago? The guy who directed all those Ocean’s movies (except Ocean’s 8) and Logan Lucky? And he got another all-star cast involved, led by the rather awesome Don Cheadle? You know, I had two options for Friday night: this or The Tomorrow War.
You know what? The Tomorrow War can wait. I much prefer Cheadle to Chris Pratt anyway.
Curtis (Cheadle) just got out of prison. It’s 1954, he’s in Detroit, and he needs to get out of there ASAP before someone he doesn’t want to meet finds him. Ronald (Benicio del Toro) is screwing around with his mob boss’s wife (Julia Fox). Both get what seems like a simple job from a powerbroker of some kind (Brendan Fraser): go with hotheaded Charley (Kieren Culkin) to some lowlevel corporate cog’s house and get the fellow (David Harbour) to get something from his employer’s safe, a job that should be easy since the cog is having a fling with the boss’s secretary. It’s a simple enough job, and it will get Curtis the money he needs to get as far from Detroit as he needs to before his past catches up with him.
Granted, no crime in a movie ever turns out as easy as it sounds like it should, and it isn’t long before Curtis and Ronald are on the run together, trying to find the missing documents and get them to somebody that will give them both a way out of their respective predicaments. Curtis is the one with the most angles here, and he’s running the show–he has no reason to trust Ronald aside from their need for mutual survival–but the thing is, when organized crime butts heads with Corporate America, particularly in the city of Detroit, things will not get any easier for anyone.
Soderbergh, working off a script from Ed Solomon, does know how to put together a very stylish crime caper. The movie functions equally adeptly as a good caper flick and a dark satire. Characters like Harbour’s Matt Wertz are not going to be getting off easy here no matter who he’s dealing with. Crime bosses like the characters played by Ray Liotta and Bill Duke are always lurking in the background, but are they the worst the city has to offer? Along the way, Soderbergh’s movie takes time to point out racial issues, the treatment of women, and corporate greed as it all relates to the plight of a handful of low and mid-level types as they try to get ahead or at least stay alive. Curtis’s ultimate goal isn’t to be the boss or be rich. He just wants enough to be able to get out of Detroit and stay out. It makes for a more modest goal, one that wouldn’t look out of place in a Coen Brothers’ movie where the best anyone can hope for is to break even. And with a charismatic actor like Cheadle in the role, it certainly helps that we can root for him without ever seeing him as a villain since, really, he doesn’t want to do more than he has to in order to leave town.
But beyond the fantastic cast and direction, the movie does have a flaw: its characters are not particularly distinctive. Harbour’s character comes closest as the guy who may be the bottom of every pile, put-upon by just about everybody, but by and large, the only real personality many of these characters have is what their actors give them. That’s where the fantastic casting comes into play so well here as well-worn (often for good reason) screen personas fill in a lot of blanks. One of the biggest criticisms about Soderbergh’s work is it is often stylish but soulless. That’s a little bit true here, but the style does carry this movie a long way. What I saw here was a good film, but maybe not quite a great one.
Grade: B
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